A DIFFERENT SL ANT EMPLO Y EE ENGAGEMEN T
]
[
Don’t
believe the hype
A DIFFERENT SL ANT EMPLO Y EE ENGAGEMEN T
]
iStockphotos
[
Employee engagement is more like a muddy puddle
than clear water, argues ROB BRINER. In this
provocative article, he discusses why HR needs
to put the concept back under the microscope
Y
ou’re a busy HR director. The
phone rings and it’s an experienced
consultant, who enthusiastically tells
you about an exciting new idea to
improve employee performance. At a
meeting he is more forthcoming: it has no
agreed definition; there is no evidence it
can be reliably measured; it’s almost
identical to ideas that have been around for 50 years; and
there is currently no quality research showing that if you
implement this idea it will increase performance.
Employee engagement shares precisely the same
characteristics as the idea presented by this consultant
but curiously it hasn’t put off the HR community. Far
from it. But are these and other problems with employee
engagement really so bad? I believe they are. What’s even
more worrying is that many HR professionals don’t seem
to know or care about them.
No meaningful definition
There are dozens of definitions of engagement. Some
focus on behaviour, or attitudes, some on feelings and
others on the work environment. Many definitions use
combinations of these or characterise it as a situation in
which one of these things, such as attitudes, affects
another, such as behaviour. When it comes to interpreting
engagement it seems that anything goes.
If confronted by this analysis HR practitioners often
say “but it doesn’t matter what you call it”. I don’t get this.
First, there is no “it” as engagement does not mean one
thing but many different things. Second, it seems to me
that a concern for precision and the clarity of thinking
There is almost no
evidence that any
measures of engagement
are valid or reliable
94 HR July 2014
that brings is the hallmark of skilled practitioners in any
field. So surely it should matter what you call things.
This definitional mess must not be ignored or
trivialised but should profoundly trouble us all.
Without a clear and agreed definition of engagement
we literally do not know or understand what we’re
talking about or doing.
No valid measures
Producing valid, reliable and hence usable measures of
any phenomena depends on several things. There needs
to be clarity, not confusion, about definition and the
phenomenon needs to be different from those already
known. Engagement is definitely not such a thing. As a
consequence there is almost no evidence that any
measures of engagement are valid or reliable.
Predictive validity is important for almost any measure.
If you measure something at one point in time does it
predict something important at a later point in time?
I do not know of any publicly available, good quality
evidence showing any measure of engagement predicting
any measure of performance.
Of course, it may be that in the future such evidence
becomes available. However, given the similarity
between engagement and job satisfaction it would be
surprising if engagement predicted performance any
more strongly than job satisfaction (which is only
sometimes and not very much).
It’s nothing new or different
If we don’t want to be taken for a ride, it’s essential that we
scrutinise any idea that claims to be new and different.
Is it worth taking seriously? Or is it just a re-branding
of old ideas? We already know that definitions of
engagement are almost identical to existing ideas such as
job satisfaction or commitment. And, as discussed, there
is also some evidence that engagement and job satisfaction
are highly correlated.
Is engagement old hat? Or is it really something new
and different? There are two simple possibilities.
˝ No. Engagement is not a new and different idea.
It should therefore be dropped immediately
because using a new term to describe existing
hrmagazine.co.uk
concepts is confusing, unhelpful and does not
add any value.
˝ Yes. Engagement is a new and different idea. If so,
then proponents of engagement need to define it in
a way that shows precisely how it is new and different,
and gather good quality evidence to show that
measures of engagement are indeed measuring
something new and different.
At the present time there is no evidence that clearly
demonstrates that engagement is a new or different idea.
No decent evidence
For any question we’re trying to answer we look around
for information or evidence. When we find it we don’t
always take it at face value, but think about how
reliable or trustworthy it is. Not all evidence is created
equal. It’s vital that we consider how good each piece of
evidence is so we can pay more attention to the
better quality evidence and less attention to evidence
of a lower quality.
Suppose you’re going on holiday in a few months to a
place you’ve never been before. You want to know what
temperatures to expect. You first ask a colleague who
went there a few years ago. You then look up the
temperature recorded there yesterday. Next you find a
website showing monthly and daily temperatures
averaged from records gathered over the past 20 years.
Which source of evidence is going to be most reliable?
It’s fairly obvious.
The same is true for the questions we ask about
engagement. The two most important or fundamental
points we need to consider are:
hrmagazine.co.uk
1
2
Do increases in engagement actually cause any
increases in performance?
Do engagement interventions increase engagement
levels and subsequently increase performance?
In other words, does engagement do anything and, if
so, can organisations do anything about engagement? If
we can’t confidently answer “yes” to both these questions
then employee engagement is (or may turn out to be) a
fairly worthless idea. So, what types of evidence allow us
to be confident about its effectiveness?
At the Center for Evidence-Based Management we
consider which types of evidence might provide reliable
and less reliable answers for different types of
management questions. Evidence-based management is
about acting on the best available evidence, which means
first identifying the reliability of each bit. In the case of
our two fundamental engagement questions there is a
very clear hierarchy.
Proponents of engagement
need to define it in a way
that shows precisely how it is
new and different
July 2014 HR 95
[
A DIFFERENT SL ANT EMPLO Y EE ENGAGEMEN T
Claims routinely made about
employee engagement are at
best sexed-up exaggerations,
and at worst plain wrong
˝ Expert opinions, anecdotes, success stories: This
is the very lowest quality evidence, yet almost all the
evidence we have about engagement fits into this
category. Such evidence can be interesting but it is
not trustworthy. What is important is the evidence
itself not the opinions of people who often
have vested interests in it.
˝ Commercial non peer-reviewed consultancy
research reports: There is also a very large
quantity of this type of evidence. In relation to our
questions this too is low-quality evidence as it is
likely to be biased and has not usually been
subject to external scrutiny. This is similar to the
evidence published by drug companies about the
efficacy of the drugs they sell.
˝ Cross-sectional studies: Though more trustworthy,
particularly if peer-reviewed, cross-sectional studies
don’t tell us about cause and effect and therefore
results from such studies are not relevant to our
two questions.
˝ Longitudinal studies: Probably the best quality
type of evidence as these could, in principle, untangle
cause and effect and answer the questions. At the
present time there are no published longitudinal
studies of employee engagement.
So, does engagement do anything and, if so, can
organisations do anything about engagement? I don’t
think we can answer this question as all we seem to
have is a lot of poor quality evidence and no good
quality evidence.
Overhyped claims
It should come as no surprise that claims routinely made
about employee engagement are at best sexed-up
exaggerations, and at worst plain wrong. Such over- and
mis-claiming can be found in many places – particularly
in popular management and consultancy writing. Here is
one example taken from the Engage for Success website.
“Despite there being some debate about the precise
meaning of employee engagement there are three things
we know about it: it is measurable; it can be correlated
with performance; and it varies from poor to great…”
The first claim, that engagement is measurable, is
correct in that anything can be measured. But that doesn’t
matter. What is important is whether those measures are
reliable, valid and therefore of practical value. As
96 HR July 2014
]
discussed above, there is no clear evidence that measures
of engagement are reliable. The second claim is that
engagement is correlated with performance. Perhaps.
But so what? From a practical perspective knowing about
correlations is of no value. What we need to know is
whether engagement is an important cause of
performance. I’m not too sure what the third claim
means. But even if engagement scores do vary from low
to high, whether that means engagement varies from
poor to great depends on whether engagement scores
predict anything important – which is unclear.
Engage for Success has gone beyond these rather vague
claims by publishing a report called The Evidence. If you
are seriously interested in the evidence for engagement I
urge you to read this report. I found that the research
cited to support many of the reports’ most important
claims did not actually provide direct or clear support
for those claims. For example, claims about cause and
effect used results from cross-sectional studies and many
of those cited did not even measure or mention
engagement but rather other concepts such as
commitment and satisfaction. But don’t just take my
word for it, take a look at the paper I produced, available
on the Engage for Success website.
Such over- and mis-claiming found in the Engage for
Success report is not at all unusual and can be found in
much of the literature produced by engagement
advocates. In general then, many of the claims made
by proponents of employee engagement appear to be
exaggerated and use supporting evidence that seems
to be about something else.
So what to do?
Do we want to take employee engagement seriously or
not? That’s the simple decision we need to make. Taking
it seriously means asking and trying to answer the sorts
of questions I’ve addressed here. Not taking it seriously
means accepting the definitional mess, being relaxed
about whether it can be measured, claiming with little
basis that it’s new and different, ignoring the fact that
there is an absence of decent evidence, and not bothering
to check whether claims about engagement have been
sexed-up. So what’s your decision going to be? HR
Rob B Briner is professor of organisational psychology at
the University of Bath’s School of Management. He is one of
HR magazine’s Most Influential UK Thinkers.
This counter view is one of a series of perspectives on
the future of employee engagement, commissioned as part
of the Engage for Success movement by the CIPD and IES.
The full collection of thought pieces is available at www.
engageforsuccess.org/future-employee-engagement
The insights from these differing perspectives are currently
informing the production of a white paper on the future
of engagement.
hrmagazine.co.uk